Into the Storm Read Free Page B

and dragged into the night? He was also more than a little confused that he was still alive. He was making random not-my-fault, please-don’t-kill-me noises from beneath Danny’s hand, which was securely covering his mouth.
    “Relax, dude,” Jenk said, playing the role of the stupid American soldier. “We were out on a sneak and peek—just a standard op, you know, a small squad? Then we ran into this mess.” He gestured toward the insurgents’ camp. “I saw that you were with them, working undercover”—yeah, right, but Yusaf stopped weeping—“and realized that, together, we can bring these fuckers down.”
    Yusaf was nodding now—loyal to whoever held the gun to his head. At least for as long as the weapon was locked and loaded.
    Jenk nodded at Danny, who took his hand from Yusaf’s mouth.
    “Thank God you are here,” Yusaf threw his arms around Jenk. “I didn’t know what to do. They killed Mrs. Naaz—”
    Jenk may have been good at lying his ass off, but there was no way he was going to stand here and discuss Suhayla with this scumbag.
    He pushed free from the embrace. “We don’t have much time before someone notices you’re missing. Here’s what we need you to do.”
    Jenk went into detail, outlining a seriously flawed plan to “fool” the insurgents into thinking they were surrounded by coalition forces. The SEALs in his squad would move into place around the perimeter of the camp, to send up flares that would mark the “position” of each of two “battalions.”
    Jenk, meanwhile, would man the radio—ready to contact the insurgent leader, to “negotiate” their surrender.
    Of course, Yusaf would return to the insurgents’ camp and tell the leader exactly how many—or in this case how few—SEALs were out there in the night.
    They’d send up those flares, and the insurgents would charge up into the mountains, leaving the downward-heading trail clear for the SEALs to make their escape. After calling in that airstrike, of course.
    And this was where Jenk’s plan got a little sketchy. With that dog and pony show going on in Kabul, an immediate airstrike might not be possible.
    So Jenk embellished, filling his story with the usual diplocrapic debris: They were virtually certain that they’d identified one of the men in the cave as a high-ranking official of an allegedly neutral country, which would help provide proof that that country had terrorist ties.
    “Which is why we can’t just call in an airstrike and blow them to shit,” Jenk lied. “We need the weapons and ammo as proof of this man’s criminal activity, do you follow?”
    Yusaf nodded.
    Jenk dropped his final disinformation bomb. “We just need to stall them,” he told the man. “For a solid twenty-four hours, until the real coalition forces arrive.” He paused, giving his words added weight. “Will you help? Will you go in there and tell them that these mountains are filled with American soldiers? Will you tell them we’ll be contacting them via radio to negotiate their surrender?”
    Yusaf just kept on nodding. “Of course,” he said.
    Of course.
    Jenk clasped the older man’s hand and poured on the sincerity. “We’re counting on you.”
    “I understand,” Yusaf said.
    Jenk nodded at Izzy and Danny, who’d volunteered to set up those flares. “Move into position. Let’s do this.”

    Lieutenant Jacquette was brilliant—letting Marky-Mark have free rein with this sitch.
    The lieutenant and the rest of the team in place, ready to boogie down the mountain, no border crossing necessary, as they destroyed the insurgents’ ammunition and didn’t die in the process.
    Izzy positioned his flare, rigging it with extra det cord. After he lit this puppy, he didn’t want to be anywhere in the neighborhood, and having a superlong fuse would allow him to get out of Dodge.
    Mark Jenkins had known just how to put a similar slow-burning fuse on Yusaf and his insurgent cronies.
    He’d even given them a reason to stick